Spare and strangely moving.
An unflinching look at people living on the edge in Vegas and Reno.
Vlautin (The Motel Life, 2007) turns his frighteningly unsentimental gaze on those drifting through life, spending much of their time with Budweiser and Jim Beam, and (occasionally) trying to find a modestly higher purpose. The central figure is Allison Johnson, whose self-esteem is lower than the elevation of the desert that surrounds her. Her boyfriend, Jimmy Bodie, is sympathetic with the skinheads and in a spasm of collective drunkenness has a swastika tattooed on Allison’s back. After numerous abuses—including being locked in the trunk of his car and handcuffed to a bed for ten hours—she’s had enough. She heads to Reno alone to have Jimmy’s baby and to escape him once and for all. After giving up her infant son for adoption, she starts to get her life together. She works as a waitress at the Cal Neva Top Deck restaurant, the graveyard shift so she has fewer human interactions to deal with. Allison’s self-image remains fragile, so much so that every so often she summons up a fantasy image of Paul Newman, who encourages her to better herself. At first Allison is a rather unattractive character—hard-drinking and pathologically timid—but eventually her fragility and vulnerability make her more sympathetic. She takes a second job as a telephone solicitor for Curt vacuum cleaners, and she even begins to date Dan Mahony, a similarly scarred (and scared) outsider, a regular customer at the Top Deck who like Allison rarely ventures outside his sphere of the familiar. Vlautin’s literary style either consciously or unconsciously echoes that of Hemingway (“They walked there in silence and she ordered a cup of coffee. He ordered a donut and coffee, and they sat at the counter.”), and it offers a simplicity of diction that conveys limited realities. By the end of the novel Allison moves tentatively toward transcending her original lot in life.
Spare and strangely moving.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-145652-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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